Teaching Innovation

Since I am a Science teacher, I feel that my curriculum really lends itself to problem solving and inquiring. My students, some whom I have taught for three years now, have gotten to know that I don't want one right answer, but rather I'm interested in their process and as many answers as possible. So when I went to a workshop from Spectrum and was given six Lego pieces and challenged to build a duck in 60 seconds, I immediately thought of doing this activity with my class.

My modified six pieces

My seven year old daughter and I spent about two hours sorting her Lego so I could provide a similar  experience to my 7s and 8s the next day. Below are some of the ducks the classes created.

Some students were a bit frustrated that their pieces were not exactly the same, others were thinking there was one right answer for a duck, and tried to improve upon their duck once they looked around the table. I think those students missed the point.

In a post-modern world where there is rarely anything "new," I could see why my students would think that they can't come up with something innovative. Maybe it's all about remixing?

I personally wanted to build my duck the fastest. When given the tower challenge later on, I wanted to build the most aesthetically pleasing one. Last week, I had challenged the Grade 8s to build card houses, but rather than assigning tallest, strongest, etc, they need to come up with what their goal was.

Their learning goal all along was teamwork and collaboration. They knew that from the start, and were supposed to encourage each other, listen to group members ideas and hopefully build on them. I hope they realize that innovation can be accomplished as a team.

So many apps, so little time...and some green screening!

Today's iPad screen shot

Just some of my apps

I've explored image manipulation programs in the past, apps that write text on pictures, apps that do collages. I've downloaded them, especially if they were free, played with them for a few days, showed them to my students, and kept on trucking. The potential in the classroom is limitless! In my continued investigation recently, I came across  Mr. Peters' website whose purposeful curricular use of many of these apps is admirable. I like how he's organized it, and I will definitely continue to explore it.

This is my to do list of projects for students next year, so far:

• Video lab reports, with or without green screen
• Memes of Science safety rules, or classroom rules
• Musical parodies of concepts, such as the Particle Theory or the Parts of the Cell or Order of Operations
• Mrs. G mentioned History news reports using the green screen (I would help by giving some Language periods for this as well)

The problem with these lofty goals, is that we have limited technology available at the school and it takes time for students to develop the technological skill set to create those products. For example, the musical parodies last year took all term to make. The Science videos took most of the unit. I felt like I didn't cover as much content, because we spent so much class time creating the product.

My solution became assessing the process, such as the script and story board for the video as well as making projects as cross-curricular as possible (Science, Oral, Media, Writing).

In the end it was worth it. We were proud of the Science videos, we shared them and viewed them several times. I don't think a final exam would've had the same effect.

Next year as we continue to explore creating complex media products, these are the more useful tutorials I found to help us as we experiment with green screens.

iMovie

Windows MovieMaker

Should we have more than 8 iPads available, we may be able to use DoInk, as it seems to be the green screen app of choice, and if you follow them on twitter, teachers are posting some fantastic examples.

How do you make time for creating? What are your challenges as you create and cover curriculum?

Reflection about using audio tools

I don't think I was ever tested on the type of learner that I am, although the more I learn the more I realize I like to read information and I like to see a picture of a concept that I find difficult. For example, I had to watch several videos of osmosis and diffusion last year before I did the lesson with the grade 8s. I suppose this all makes me a visual learner.

However I do realize that I have to teach students who are audio learners and I have used audio tools in the classroom. Here's my audio reflection and even though I would prefer to write a blog post or do a Powtoons, or read off of a presentation with a screen capture...here's just the Audio Reflection and the script (in case you are like me and you like to read along).

With technology making it so easy for students to edit and create audio products, here's a complex media product that I hope we can make for Science concepts this year.

The most important thing for teachers to consider is, that since we are catering to many different learners and preferences, differentiation of content and product is key. Just like I told my Grade 8s this past year, as students, you need to ensure that you tell your teacher how you prefer to learn and show your learning. As teachers, we need to listen to these voices, even if we need more than just the audio.

Our Journey with Podcasts

Last year, the fabulous Mrs. Ciarloni and her husband, long time fans of The Vinyl Cafe stories with Stuart McLean,  thought it may be fun for the intermediates to analyze podcasts and write their own. Between the three rotary teachers, each one of us picked two shows and we wrote questions for students to answer while they listened to the podcast and then discuss after in groups or as a class. Some of the stories are not K-12 appropriate, but this one I did we could probably use with 5 and 6s as well. Pet's Podcast with Questions and Answers (Google Doc)

As an extension, I thought kids could find their own podcast, write their own questions and I could put it in our D2L discussion forums for my early finishers. But after six weeks, we were ready to move on.

We also had an opportunity to see Stuart McLean live and attend a podcast in December. Yes, we took a busload of intermediate kids to downtown Hamilton and it was a blast! Several of the parents were jealous of our adventure.

After the listening unit, we then wrote narrative stories. Here's a blog post about that process. I had encouraged students to submit their stories to the show, but I left it up to them. Lastly, we created our own podcasts. I didn't keep any samples of the students' podcasts, but we did play them for family who came to be our "audience," and if they couldn't attend, they had a digital version they were able to share with them. I received positive feedback from parents.

Here's my podcast created on Garageband. The podcast is written by me and the songs I have purchased and are stored in my iTunes library. It's not perfect and as a class we had a bit of a competition to see who could give the most feedback for me to improve. It only took me about an hour to do, but when they created their's at school, we used Audacity, iMovie and a combination of several devices as well. Some recorded their parts at home and brought them to school to compile while others took their group's recordings home to compile. It took my students about a week to create the podcast, but the writing of the podcast really did take several months. Here's a link to the assignment and rubric.

This ended up being a yearlong project that took us until close to the end of June to finish and I'm glad I stuck it out with my class, as the other intermediate classes finished their podcasts shortly after Christmas break, I didn't want to rush ours.

Thank you to Stuart McLean and CBC for the inspiration!

Tech tools I want to try.

These are the three new to me tools I will be trying next year.

Edmettle

http://www.edmettle.com

Created by Brian Aspinall, this website intrigues me because I've been looking for a way to report on the learning skills more efficiently to parents. For example, currently I use a homework book where I write down the missed homework on a sticky note, then I have to write them down on their homework page and then, I have to photocopy that homework page after 10 missed assignments or once a month, which ever comes first. I could award a mettle for no missed assignments and I could also make a note on Edmettle every time there is a missed assignment. Plus, we can add teachers to our class and comment, since we do a lot of rotary in our division. Once teachers have awarded mettles on the learning skills, I can download a word document and possibly use those comments for report cards. Parents have access to those comments as well as the website provides a parent code. Here is a guided tour from the creator.

No Red Ink

After the success I had with Prodigy last year, I realize students like using games for review so I thought I would give this a try.

https://www.noredink.com

I assign minimal homework on a daily basis, but some parents do ask me for extra review, and I would be able to track student progress, without necessarily using it for assessment. Hopefully their grammar skills would improve as did their Math skills when they would play Prodigy. Plus, since I will have the split again, this is something that could be left for my early finishers while I'm working with small groups.

OneNote

This blog post really spells out why OneNote would be a great asset to my classroom and students. Since students already have Microsoft accounts, whereas my Google accounts would need to be created and managed, I could start using this right away in September. We have several laptops, surfaces and of course we encourage BYOD and OneNote is device agnostic and can be accessed on or offline. OneNote would be the perfect place for students to keep track of their inquiries and questions as well as any rough drafts of writing assignments.

I'm really looking forward to using these tools with my students next year!

It's Delicious!!

I recently joined the social bookmarking site Delicious. In my investigation I ran into some how to videos and a great article from one of my favourite websites, Edutopia. However, this article is from 2007 and the video I found is from 2012. A more recent blog post from @bloggucation does bring up some interesting points on how to use Delicious as well. I've added the button to my favourites and I'm ready to start bookmarking websites and tagging!

I could see this as an alternative to twitter. I would continue to use the hashtags I use to organize resources for my classes. Since my teaching partners are anti-twitter, we could create an account and add bookmarks to it together (although we've done that before on Google Docs). Plus, I'm spending a lot of time tracking my websites that I do retweet, it would be nice to tag them in one spot.

I started adding some resources from this Hoax website list onto my Delicious account (@omskibinski). When we do our first research lesson with the students I'm going to have them pick one of the #acsnsci research articles that I've tagged and to use Science to prove the information is wrong. What better way to show their Science knowledge and their critical thinking!

After using the hashtag #hoax to search on Delicious I was able to find even more I could stop and add to my list and even tag as #acsnhist or #acsngeo for my teaching partner. I look forward to continue to explore Delicious.

Put your critical thinking caps on!!

Google vs. Microsoft...I remain neutral

First off, I'm mostly a Google Aps user. I keep my teaching documents/resources on the Drive and I'm loving the Google+ forum. We recently received approval at my school to start using Google classroom in the fall. We also have the option of using Microsoft 365. I have been wanting to try it since James Gill's @jagill presentation at Connect last spring. Although, Andrew Campbell's @acampbell99 thoughts on "Five Reasons NOT to use EdTech" also had me thinking about labelling myself or my classroom with a brand. I think I will continue to use the D2L LMS environment for now, since when it comes to EdTech, I seem to continue to be a jack of all trades and a master of none.

As far as my Google Aps usage, I put all my lessons on Slides and my assignments on Docs and link into D2L or twitter. I haven't used GAFE as collaboration tools with my students, mostly because I didn't have admin approval until now, but I have with my teaching colleagues for the past two years. I was able to figure out how to collaborate using D2L discussion forums, although it may not be to the same extent as GAFE.

A few general pros and cons of Google vs. Office 365

• Office 365 will prompt to reenter the password when accessing sensitive information, I often must log off other people from their Google account
• There is more storage on Google Drive, Office 365 OneDrive has 15G as well, but any Google Doc or slide (what I use) counts as free storage 
• I much prefer Outlook over Gmail, probably out of habit, but from my iPad or iPhone they are both the same
• Office 365 may be accessed offline, not so much for Google Drive, but you could download any documents for offline use
• They are both just as easy to collaborate/share documents with using links
• Either is a good option for students to have cloud storage (no more lost USBs!)
• Excel survey seems to be the alternative to Google Forms

However, I keep hearing about Sway:

I will be definitely trying Sway out with my students in the fall. We currently have four first version surface tablets that I'm hoping I can use for this, but we can also use the laptops or ipads. Here's something that one of our fabulous teachers, Miss Dorland @MsD_QOH did with her Grade 2 students using Sway:

Not only is Skyping one of my next steps as well, but wouldn't it be amazing to collaborate this way with another classroom?

In the end, it's all preference and accessibility. What's your best tool for the purpose?